When I saw that Cobie Smulders had a photospread up for Esquire, I may have flinched at the thought, not because Smulders isn’t insanely sexy. It’s just that she’s not tawdry, and Esquire has a tendency to photograph some celebrity women who are not otherwise tawdry in a manner that makes them appear so.

See Exhibit A.

That, of course, was Lawrence’s first major photoshoot, and I think she was attempting to show another side of herself that we hadn’t seen in Winter’s Bone.

Exhibit B is what they did with Lena Headey. She’s fierce, just like her Game of Thrones character, but she also wears frilly lingerie.

Not that Esquire doesn’t do some of the actresses they shoot justice. See, e.g., Gillian Anderson. Sexy, but also classy.

I think that’s the spirit with which they approached their Cobie Smulders photoshoot. She’s not wearing pants, and yet, there’s a commanding power to the photos, the kind of photos that say, “This is how I wanted to pose, not how they asked me to pose.”

I’m particularly fond of the first photo, which seems to say, “Please to enjoy the view, but keep your distance or I WILL BREAK YOU.”

You can see more of the pics, and read about Cobie’s puzzlement with the Internet’s Cobie Smulders’ foot fetish over on Esquire. In the meantime, the How I Met Your Mother finale airs on March 31st. It’s going be a six-tissue bawler.